While part one covered a period that for the most part consisted of good times for the Packard Motor Company, the second and concluding part is its mirror image. In early 1942, along with all other US domestic carmakers, Packard stopped building cars and its factory was refitted to assist the allied war effort.
The company built Rolls-Royce Merlin engines as used in the P-51 Mustang fighter — they were the only producer deemed to be capable of building these engines to the tight tolerances required for the Merlin, a fact which reflects the quality image Packard enjoyed in those days.
Due to a government dictated imposition of excess profits tax however, the wartime contracts did not generate nearly as much money for the carmakers as one would suppose; in fact, Packard’s working capital actually had decreased by the time the war was over. Moreover, the war had deprived Packard of the substantial profit it doubtless would have made selling the so well-received Clipper.
There was, of course, in the autumn of 1945 an opportunity for Packard to decide to concentrate on the top end of the car market, as it had up to the mid-thirties. It would be a seller’s market after all for the first few years after World War Two and the hunger of the public for cars — any cars — was great, Many amongst them had also saved up more money than they might have done in peacetime. Cadillac had dropped both its 12 and 16-cylinder cars before the war broke out, so if Packard had reintroduced its Twelve and Super Eight models using the Clipper as a base, it would have had the field all to itself.
There were, however, a few serious potential downsides to this idea: many amongst the Packard dealer community and stockholders would likely have objected strongly, and economic experts had predicted a sharp recession after World War Two, as indeed had happened after the first World War, but this did not materialise — rather the contrary, in fact.
Packard Motor Company chose to continue on the high volume, medium priced car route, and a seemingly trivial event cemented its path: Max Gilman, the managing director of Packard, was involved in a car accident that put him in hospital, but he was not alone — his passenger was the wife of another high-ranking Packard executive. Fearing a scandal with unpleasant fallout in the media, Macauley fired Gilman and replaced him with George Christopher.
Gilman had been the driving force behind the trendsetting luxury Clipper and favoured bringing Packard back to the top of the US domestic pecking order, but Christopher — unsurprisingly, considering his background — pushed for higher production volumes, which inevitably meant much less emphasis on the turf that Cadillac now increasingly claimed. Other factors, too, were at play: steel producers and parts suppliers suffered union strikes meaning materials and parts were in short supply.
Because Christopher decided to build a new assembly line in order to be able to produce the greater amounts of cars he envisioned, it took longer than planned before production could be resumed, and now that the Clipper was the only model Packard produced, Macauley had chosen to continue the contractual agreement with an outside supplier, the Briggs Body company, who had built all Packard Clipper bodies starting in late 1941. Briggs itself, however, also had a reputation for problems with the unions and strikes were rife, meaning that Packard was unable to produce any cars for almost three months in the crucial period when the carmakers all resumed production after a three-year hiatus and the public flocked to the car showrooms to buy them.
During the war, development of car design had mostly come to a complete standstill at all American carmakers by Government decree, although some work was still done in secret at times. Surviving material shows most planned designs for the mid-forties were very rotund, streamlined cars with in some cases both front and rear wheels enclosed. This style was known as the ‘envelope body’. However, not many makers actually offered production cars styled in this fashion after the war — Cadillac cancelled its version at quite a late stage in its development — but Hudson and especially Nash did do so. And Packard too, although in its case it facelifted the existing Clipper.
The result quickly earned the nickname ‘the pregnant elephant’ and it’s not difficult to see why. The previously elegant Clipper(1) had morphed into a bulbous blob of a car with little grace, especially compared to the also new Cadillac with its still tasteful vestigial tailfins. That same Cadillac also provided the benefit of a V8 engine and a fully automatic transmission, neither of which Packard offered at the time. The millions spent on the facelift and higher capacity production lines might have been better spent on speeding up the development of both these increasingly popular features.
A convertible had finally joined the range but the darling of the late forties and fifties luxury crowd, a hardtop coupé, was not offered, although a prototype had been built during the war. Instead, an impractical ‘woody’ station wagon was added to the catalogue, a type of car that had worn out its welcome by then. The car remained virtually the same in the following two model years — even the ‘golden anniversary’ 1949 Packard celebrating the marque’s 50th birthday may have introduced the company’s Ultramatic automatic transmission but otherwise had only a new gold colour option to offer.
Christopher had set its sights on Oldsmobile and Buick rather than Cadillac in the sales and marketing strategy for Packard, and almost 99,000 cars were built in both the 1948 and 1949 model years. However, with the sellers market well and truly over, the 1950 models found only just over 40,000 buyers — an alarming drop. There was turmoil at Packard: many disheartened dealers lost confidence and cancelled their contracts, Alvin Macauley retired and George Christopher was fired (although to the outside world it was presented as though he had retired). Christopher was succeeded by Hugh Ferry, who would bring in successful Hotpoint executive James Nance to replace him in 1952.
For the 1951 model year, there finally was an all-new Packard. Styled under the direction of John Reinhart the car looked up to date with no traces of its bloated predecessor left, but at the same time looked more like a competitor for Oldsmobile, Mercury and Buick than a car to take the fight to Cadillac — George Christopher’s philosophy clearly still left its mark. Offered in three levels of trim (200, 300 and, on a longer wheelbase, Patrician 400) the available bodystyle line-up raised eyebrows: there were only two and four-door sedans, and the appearance of a business coupé — a type of vehicle that was quickly falling out of favour — left the public confused about what exactly Packard wanted to be.
The traditional straight-eight engines also remained, although Packard was not alone in this regard. Packard reacted to criticism on the lack of a convertible and two-door hardtop by hastily adding the 250 series in mid-model year which offered both. In the end, 1951 would still be quite a good year for the company with just over 100,000 cars sold, although the Korean war had a lot to do with this. Being deprived of new car availability for years was still fresh in the memory of the public, and many rushed to buy a new car for fear of being stuck with the old bus again — and they were not too picky.
The cars remained visually mostly unchanged between 1951 and 1954, although two noteworthy features were added: in 1952 Packard became the first American car to offer power brakes, developed by Bendix. The next year, air-conditioning returned to the options list. Packard had been the first to offer it as an option in 1940 but the high price and iffy reliability of the then new-fangled system caused it to be dropped soon afterwards. Unfortunately, after a good start, sales dwindled with just slightly over 31,000 cars finding owners in 1954.